for people who care about the West

Pillaging the Past

Human bones lie bleached and
scattered, a ribcage stove in here, shoulder and arm bones over
there. It looks as if a war was waged between armies of skeletons
in this remote canyon south of the Arizona border. All these bones
were once in the ground, but then artifact-hungry diggers came and
upended the graves.

I came to northern Mexico thinking
that archaeological sites down here would be less ravaged than
those in my home territory around Utah, Arizona, Colorado and New
Mexico. I was partly right. The wilderness of Chihuahua and Sonora
looks the way the rest of the Southwest did 40 years ago, a time
when pothunting was in full swing but before the majority of sites
were looted beyond recognition. North of the border, even these
bones would have been taken, put on shelves or sold in curio shops.

The bones stuck out of spoil piles at all angles. I
leaned down and brushed dirt back over a piece of a 700-year-old
smashed skull. A slight gesture, sure, but I had to do something.

For days, I walked from one cliff dwelling to the next
along the length of a rich, south-facing canyon. The ancient
structures all looked like someone had gone through them with a
sledgehammer. Holes were busted into chambers and adobe walls. The
floors were churned into a mulch of dry corn cobs, broken pottery,
and fragments of bone. I took to re-burying the human remains. The
skull of a dead child was light and hollow in my hand, dry like a
gourd. I carried the leg bones of a tall man like broomsticks in my
arms, looking for the hole they came from.

It has been
estimated that 90 percent of the archaeological sites in the
Southwest, including Mexico, have been vandalized. That means that
out of every 10 graves, only one has not been disturbed. Out of
every 10 pots, only one is left in the ground. A land once rich
with ancestry has been scraped almost entirely clean.

I
came to a looter's spoil pile and dug out a pot that had been split
in two with a shovel. I could imagine the pothunter leveraging his
bootsole against the blade, a sloppy mistake marked by the pop of a
vessel underground, followed by a curse in Spanish.

"Fuck
you," I said, tired of all this desecration. I dropped the two
pieces of the pot to the ground.

Mexico is plundered. The
caves of Arizona have been emptied down to bedrock. Parts of New
Mexico look carpet-bombed. In Utah, I frequently find graves
freshly looted, the soft packing of juniper bark ripped out like
gift wrapping. Southwest Colorado feels ravaged and beaten. Even
Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde and the hundreds of sites excavated
because they lay in the path of pipelines and drill rigs and
subdivisions have been pillaged, if in a more systematic,
meticulous way. It is hard not to be angry, witnessing this
wholesale removal of human antiquity from the land. I decided then
to follow these artifacts, see where they've gone, and discover who
is to blame. I thought I would find something black-and-white,
clearly divided between good guys and bad guys. Instead, I found
something in between the two, a gray world populated by armed
renegades, careful collectors and serious scholars.

Over the past 20 years I've traveled the
Southwest, trying to find the pothunters and understand what drives
them to do what they do. I've seen the graves that were looted and
I've met the people who dug them up - both professionally and
illegally. And I've wandered through the depositories of these
relics, from the cavernous halls of East Coast museums to the
shelves of Albuquerque collectors. But perhaps the most revealing
was my visit last month to Blanding, Utah, the hometown of Earl K.
Shumway, who may be the most notorious gravedigger of all.

A federal ranger once told me that if Shumway ever got
within 15 feet of her, she would shoot him. She was serious. She
refused to give her name for fear of reprisal, but she told me
Shumway is a heavily armed and irreverent badass. Because of people
like him, she wears a bulletproof life vest when working the river,
carries a SIG Sauer 9mm sidearm with 40 rounds on her person, keeps
a 12 gauge shotgun with an extended chamber and extra rounds
nearby, and an M-16 rifle with extra loaded magazines for when she
really needs it. I reminded her that Shumway had officially died of
cancer.

"He's been dead before,"
she said.

During the height of his southeast Utah
pothunting career in the 1980s and '90s, Shumway claimed to have
looted 10,000 archaeological sites. And he was not neat about it.
He left the sites looking as if a bomb had gone off. The bones of
children were rudely scattered to get to their burial goods.

Shumway belonged to a Dukes of Hazzard
mentality rooted in the Sagebrush Rebellion and a general
anti-federal atmosphere in the West. Besides, he was from Blanding,
where pothunting has been a pastime for generations.

For
a thousand years, southeastern Utah was a bastion of the Pueblo
people. They covered the land with corn, beans, and masonry
architecture. Just before the turn of the 14th century, social
upheaval and a killing drought sent most of them south. They never
returned, but they left innumerable artifacts behind.

Today, many of those artifacts can be found in Huck's Trading Post
and Anasazi Museum, which sits along the highway on the edge of
Blanding.

Old Huck himself - a short gray man in his late
80s - shuffles around his collection waiting for the next visitor
to knock on his peeling doorframe. For a couple dollars he'll take
you through cluttered galleries of potsherds and arrowheads glued
into frames. He even spelled out the words SAN JUAN COUNTY UTAH by
cutting potsherds into letters with a bandsaw. Flicking the lights
on room by room, he'll show you display cases filled with dusty
antiquarian wealth from the surrounding area. His shop is
unbelievable, a kind of archaeological porn palace.

"Oh,
I traded for a lot of it," Huck says, his voice reduced to a
gravelly, almost inaudible whisper. "People were always selling or
looking for a trade. Are you from the government? No? You sure?
Some people come in here and say they want to get me in trouble.
But I'll show anybody my things. I'm not hiding anything."

Relic hunting has long been a hobby around Blanding.
Sunday picnics included shovels. Kids rifled through spoil piles
for beads or pretty potsherds, while the older ones dug craters
into the red soil. For some it was a competition to see who could
find the most beautiful or the most curious object. A painted 11th
century olla in perfect condition was worth monumental bragging
rights in town. Some sold the artifacts, and some kept them,
treasuring them as mementos.

The tradition was handed
down from generation to generation, and mantelpieces and "museums"
like Huck's were littered with the loot. Then, something went sour.
And that something was Earl Shumway.

It seemed that no
one could catch him. He would vanish for weeks, a snake down a
hole. For a while he was rumored to have died. Then he was spotted
digging around Labyrinth Canyon near Green River, apparently very
much alive. Whenever he returned home to Blanding, he was full of
swashbuckling bravado. Shumway romanced reporters on the phone,
boasting that he was armed and dangerous, bragging about the
handsome and very illegal living he made selling artifacts on the
black market. He dared the law to find him.

And the law
tried. Federal agents defending various antiquities laws came by
helicopter and truck and on foot in hot pursuit. Most of the
vandals they were after were relatively harmless, engaging in what
they saw as a righteous act of rebellion against an increasingly
oppressive federal government. It was an exciting game. Shumway,
however, took the game to the next level. He announced that he
would kill any federal agent he encountered in the backcountry.

Agents busted him in 1986 for
archaeological crimes, but he was a slippery character. To get out
of a conviction he gave the names of people who kept illicit
artifacts in their homes, most of them people he held a grudge
against. Some were pothunters, some were traders, and some just had
artifacts handed down to them as heirlooms.

One of the
most notorious archaeological criminals of our time walked free
while federal agents raided the people he'd ratted on. It all
happened one morning in June of 1986. Doors were kicked in all over
local towns, mostly in Blanding. With the armored ruthlessness of a
drug bust, more than 300 pre-Columbian vessels were seized in a
single stroke. The wife of a longtime Blanding pothunter said the
experience was terrifying. Her two little kids were crying, and she
covered them with her arms as agents with guns stormed through her
house, aiming their spotting scopes into every room. "It felt like
something out of Nazi Germany," she told me 20 years later, her
voice still honestly fearful. "I didn't think something like that
could happen in this country."

The community is still
dealing with the fallout. Friends and neighbors were estranged by
what happened on that day. Even though Shumway was finally caught
in 1995 and sent to prison for six and a half years with what was
at the time the biggest conviction ever handed down for antiquities
crimes in the U.S., and even though he eventually died after his
release, his shadow still lies across this part of the state.

Maybe there is a curse that comes from
digging up graves. If so, Earl Shumway seems like the embodiment of
that curse. He left the Blanding pothunting community in shambles.

Winston Hurst is the local
archaeologist in Blanding. Of good Mormon family, he traces his
mother's lineage in the area back to 1880, and his father's to
1910. Speaking about archaeology in the community, he looked tired.

"I'm never sure whether to laugh, cry or puke when I
think about this stuff," Hurst said.

He took me into the
Edge of the Cedars Museum on the west side of town. There he stood
among artifacts confiscated in the 1986 raid, antiquities that once
belonged to his neighbors. The museum was deemed a federal
repository, and that is where the loot went. Many in town still
consider this a betrayal, their hard-earned antiquities turned into
public property. They say the museum is in cahoots with the
government to take away people's collections in order to fill its
shelves.

Hurst, a somber-voiced middle-aged man, grew up
pothunting. His parents expressed a quiet dislike for unruly
digging, saddened whenever old familiar sites were cratered, but
like many of his peers Hurst was fascinated by what lay in the
ground. Once, he dug up a couple of graves and stashed entire human
skeletons in the pantry next to the canned peaches. (His mother
thought this was vulgar.) But Hurst and his brother saw themselves
as budding scientists. He even employed a microscope, though he now
admits he had not the slightest clue what to do with it.

Hurst went on to study archaeology at Brigham Young University. He
became a professional archaeologist, channeling his interest into
what he saw as a constructive format, a way to expand knowledge
without having to personally possess artifacts.

"When
things are done right and an artifact is collected with its context
documented in some detail, that documentation travels with the
artifact," Hurst says. "The information is curated and the museum
maintains it in perpetuity. The connection between the object and
the ground is saved. That's a whole different thing than when you
take it and stick it on some shelf, or you sell it to a stockbroker
in New York. That just pops that connection between object and
ground. It sterilizes the ground and strips the artifact of its
information."

But he holds no
grudge against his pothunting neighbors. Few of them are like Earl
Shumway, he says; most are thoughtful, private people. And even the
Shumway family should not be stereotyped; it's a large and diverse
clan that spans a wide range of attitudes and sensitivities. In
fact, Hurst took archaeology classes with a Blanding pothunter who
was equally curious about the past; that friend was a Shumway. The
two of them shared the same interests, but in the end chose
different paths. His friend returned to pothunting - and
eventually, in the summer of '86, the feds crashed through his
door.

Hurst points to a black-on-red jar on a shelf just
above eye-level, and said it came from the raid on his friend's
house. It is a beautiful jar, the red paint like blush. Its ceramic
handle is shaped into an animal, perhaps a coyote, with two
turquoise beads for eyes. It must have been extraordinary to find a
treasure like that, to bring it up out of the dust in clasped
fingers, holding it to the light like a sacred chalice. Hurst says
that there is still local animosity about many of these objects,
that one in particular. Those who had the money fought in court and
got some of their treasures back. Those who did not have the money
lost everything.

"It's painful to me every time I see an
artifact leave the ground and go anywhere," Hurst admits. "Whether
it's into somebody's private collection or even into a museum. At
this point, I'd rather see it in the ground."

Diggers come in many varieties. Some do it
legally. They are called archaeologists. I traveled with a
truckload of them down a dirt road in the dry hill country of
northern Arizona. We arrived at a barren prominence, and five
workers hopped out of the back. The truck then turned around, dust
rising behind it for miles as it vanished into the desert to the
north. It would return for them at the end of the day.

Up
the flank of the hill the five carried shovels, trowels and boxes
of equipment. At the top were the grids and circles of a ruined
12th century settlement. They got right to work on hands and knees
with their trowels and little picks. The crew was from the
University of Arizona in Tucson, part of a summer field school
studying the prehistoric margins of the desert.

They were
not digging up graves. The bureaucracy today discourages such
behavior. Passed in 1990, the Native American Graves Protection and
Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) requires layers of tribal permission and
paperwork every time a human bone is uncovered. The policy now is
to dig away from graves rather than toward them. But they still dig
up peoples' homes, and collect and dissect the things that once
made up a family's everday life. They disturb things that may have
been left here, in this place and in this manner, for a reason.

What is the difference between archaeologists and
pothunters? I once asked Mark Varien this question. He's a
venerable and levelheaded archaeologist in the Four Corners area.
Varien admitted that like pothunters, archaeologists are
collectors. But archaeological sites are a "non-renewable
resource," he said, and once artifacts are out of the ground, their
original context is destroyed.

"But we document what we
find," Varien said. "Through this documentation what has been
destroyed is preserved, hopefully in perpetuity."

In
other words, archaeologists leave a paper trail. But why are they
digging in the first place?

Varien said they are
preserving the record of human occupation on the earth. Otherwise,
increasing population, ongoing development and the forces of nature
will destroy that record. "Think about the world 100 years from
now, 1,000 years from now, and tens of thousands of years from
now," he said.

Archaeologists are
simply thinking ahead and behind at the same time, trying to keep
the future from destroying the record of the past.

To
this end, the five diggers scratched their way down through the
Arizona hillside, uncovering a buried Pueblo village to get
whatever information and artifacts they could. I crouched at the
edge of one of the trenches. A young woman troweling around the
circle had found the mouth of a corrugated jar, shattered but all
there.

I stayed at the edge of the trench and watched for
an hour as the woman exposed the jar's gray curves. With every
hard-packed horizon of soil she removed, she took measurements,
wrote it all down. She was re-creating context, building a new ruin
on paper that could be studied thousands of years from now if
somehow her papers survive that long. Just in case, everything had
to be perfect.

The University of Arizona is a stickler
for details. Other researchers, however, have been accused of not
adhering to scientific standards, digging without providing
paperwork. This puts some of them back into the category of
pothunters. A study in Great Britain showed that in a five-year
period only 25 percent of excavations were properly documented.

That was not a problem here. Every specimen was accounted
for.

"Here's a piece," the woman said.

A gray
curve of jar peeled easily into her hand. It was half the size of
her palm. She passed it up to me and asked if I would start a bag
for it. I snapped open a brown paper lunch sack and slid the sherd
inside.

She passed more pieces to me, and I fit them into
others like a broken dish to be thrown away. The vessels coming out
of this dig were simple prehistoric cookware, the outside of this
one blackened from cooking over a fire. It was the kind of artifact
you can buy on the Internet, armloads of them for sale at a hundred
bucks each. But to archaeologists, money has nothing to do with it.
Anything you find is precious, holding an unknown wealth of data.

The last piece came out, and I slid it neatly into the
sack. The woman continued to scritch at the soil with her trowel,
mechanically working the next layer down. Like everyone else on
this dig, she yearned to piece time back together. I reached into a
nearby supply box, tore an inch of masking tape off and closed the
sack, adding this jar to a greater body of knowledge.

The sack containing the broken jar, like most of
the artifacts uncovered at the dig, went back to the university,
bound for the Arizona State Museum. But there is a problem: The
museum is almost full. In the next five to 10 years, every public
repository in Arizona will have topped out. Institutions across the
nation face the same difficulty. Yet archaeologists keep digging.
In some cases, the digging is a matter of protecting cultural
resources, salvaging artifacts before they are crushed by new
developments or pipelines. In other cases, such as academic
excavations, it is mostly a matter of scholarship. Either way,
museums are choking on all that has been gathered.

Glade
Hadden, a Bureau of Land Management archaeologist working in
western Colorado, calls it an "act of silliness" when
archaeologists keep what they excavate. Walking with Hadden at an
archaeological site on the Uncompahgre Plateau, I asked what he
does with artifacts he finds.

"I don't take things
anymore unless I have to," Hadden responded. "The argument 'if we
don't take it, somebody else will' doesn't work for me. If you're
really a scientist, why would you need to possess the object
itself? It's just an object. It's just stuff. For what
archaeologists purport themselves to be, all they really need is
context. After that, you're just a collector."

To prove
his point, Hadden bent down and picked up a sliver of shiny stone,
left over from prehistoric tool manufacture. "Like this," Hadden
said. "If I had done a surface collection here, this would be in a
storage bag. You'd have no idea anything ever happened here."

Museums and repositories that hold
onto such bags are not only running out of space, they're running
out of money. Most can hardly afford to curate what they have, much
less what continues to pour in from fresh excavations. The U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers has 50,000 cubic feet of artifacts that
came from the field. Three-quarters of this collection is
improperly stored, and most of it is steadily deteriorating. It
would take $20 million to put the collection in order, yet nothing
has been offered but further budget cuts.

I have visited
federal repositories around the country and seen the cardboard
boxes and artifacts crowded shoulder-to-shoulder. At one, ceiling
tiles were piss-stained from a leaky toilet upstairs. Many public
collections are falling apart, and there is little hope for repair.
Curators around the country complain of bags splitting open, boxes
decaying and collapsing. Sacks of soil samples are spilling into
each other, and some are being "deaccessioned" - thrown in the
trash to make room for more. A recent study of artifacts held in
public trust in the United States found that 40 percent are in
unknown condition, many untouched since the day they first arrived.
The future of many such collections is not hopeful.

But there are places where relics are revered,
carefully arranged and proudly displayed. One small repository,
though far from public, is the home of Art and Betty Cooper. The
house, in an Albuquerque suburb, looks like a museum - every wall,
shelf and corner is dressed with antiquities - except for the
magazines on the end table and the dishes and spice rack in the
kitchen.

Art and Betty Cooper are not their real names.
They have asked for anonymity for fear they will be looted. The
Coopers own nearly 300 pre-Columbian vessels from the Southwest.
The highest-valued piece in their house is worth $50,000. Most
originated in ruins and graves in the Southwest, including Mexico.
The law is fuzzy about these sorts of things. If an artifact came
from private land in the United States or has been in circulation
long enough - before various laws, including the 1906 Antiquities
Act, were enacted - it is legal to own. If it came from outside the
U.S., other laws apply. But proof of origin is nearly impossible to
come by. If federal agents appeared with a warrant and confiscated
their collection, the Coopers would have to wage lengthy and
expensive court battles to get most of it back.

Some of
their collection was bought from an antiquities dealer in Chicago,
some from a less-reputable dealer in southern New Mexico, and even
a handful off the Internet.

Art, a gray-haired man of
letters, proudly showed me a 14th century vessel he bought on the
Internet a few days earlier. He gently handed it to me, a bold
effigy jar the size of a large coffee mug. The effigy is of a
woman, anatomically correct and richly painted. You would drink
from the woman's head.

There is no lack of buyers and sellers. A
December 2007 issue of Time magazine put the antiquities trade at
the top of its list for good investments. The article was spurred
by the $57.2 million sale of a 5,000-year-old Mesopotamian figurine
the size of an iPod. Time lauded this as a
promising sign for even small-time investors.

In the
world market, Southwest artifacts hold their own. A finely
decorated Mimbres bowl from southwestern New Mexico or a Sikyatki
yellow ware from Hopi country can fetch $100,000 on the open
market.

It's a thriving business.
But is it ethical? Many scholars argue that it is not. They say
that private collectors - who are generally unconcerned with
regimented, scientific processes - are part of the destruction of
human antiquity. Still, one thing was clear at the Coopers' house:
they at least adored their artifacts. Each was carefully dusted and
positioned just so. The artifacts filled room after room, lined up
on shelves and arranged inside showcases big as wardrobes. Even the
refrigerator was topped by a row of painted vessels.

"They are so beautiful, aren't they?" Betty said, as she showed me
their collection. Even though the Chicago dealer has been offering
good prices for a few of their artifacts, they do not want to break
the collection. They are in love with it.

"I have visited
many of the great archaeological sites in the world," Art said with
a traveled, scholarly tone to his voice. "To own something of a
past civilization is to better understand it and put the present in
perspective. To live with something from that civilization is to
have a spiritual connection with it."

Art believes that
common people are being left out of antiquities circles. "Few are
allowed to touch or even cherish these ancient objects," he said.
"There have been collectors from time immemorial. Archaeologists
are but Johnny-come-latelies, with an attitude that only they have
a right to collect and interpret the past. I consider myself a
temporary custodian and will endeavor to have my collection remain
in private ownership. One Indian woman told me that by protecting
such material I will, in turn, be protected by the benevolent
spirits of the people who made them."

Betty added that
when they first began collecting in the 1990s, they had no idea
there was an ethical issue. They were simply enchanted with
antiquities, and they had the money to buy them. Now they find
themselves wary of prosecution and persecution. Many scholars are
on a rampage against private collectors, and federal investigators
are tightening their grip. Last January, a five-year undercover
operation reached a climax when agents showed up with a 150-page
warrant at the Silk Roads Gallery in Los Angeles. The owners, a
pair of distinguished art historians, were accused of smuggling
artifacts from around the world, including New Mexico. Along with
the gallery, four Southern California museums were raided, all
holding artifacts allegedly smuggled by Silk Roads.

Art
and Betty know fellow collectors who have had their collections
raided and who have lost beloved pieces. The confiscated material
goes into storage at federal repositories, which are often
overloaded to begin with. Though the Coopers occasionally lend
vessels to museums for temporary display, they try to keep quiet
about what they have.

The basic argument against them is
clear. For every illicit artifact, there is a hole in the ground
somewhere, an empty tomb, a ravaged grave. The objects are left
with no recorded context. Well-meaning collectors like the Coopers
are just a few steps removed from scattering human bones across the
ground. The more they buy, and the more they pay, the deeper
pothunters will dig to meet the demand. Judging by the quality of
their collection, I would guess that nearly every piece came from a
grave. Art assured me they only buy objects that have been on the
market for so long that it hardly matters any more. The pits left
by the looters have healed over.

"I've often been
approached to buy from pothunters, and I have always declined," he
said.

What that means is that they do not buy directly
from pothunters. But somewhere along the way there was a shovel and
a bootsole and someone digging up a grave.

Anibal Rodriguez is another keeper of
artifacts, but of a completely different caliber. He works in the
bowels of the American Museum of Natural History in New York,
overseeing one of the largest and most impressive Southwest
collections in the world. There are no leaky pipes, no
disintegrating boxes here. And no kitchen sinks or magazines.

"We are the model of how museum collections should be
kept," Rodriguez said.

For more than 40 years, he has
been caring for this collection. He is a smartly observant man,
born in the Bronx, speaking with a strong Puerto Rican accent from
his home neighborhood. His dark hair is distinguished with streaks
of gray.

As we moved down corridors in the museum,
Rodriguez told me how disorganized the collection was when he first
came to it. He has since brought it back to life. He walked around
the collections with a casual sense of ownership. There was not a
sound but the humming of air ducts and our footsteps padding one
behind the other.

"I am the keeper of the ancients, a
steward," Rodriguez said as he waved an electronic key, releasing a
series of locks on a metal door. We walked into another corridor as
long and quiet as the last. "I would guard these artifacts with my
life."

I asked him about where the artifacts he oversees
will be in a thousand years, in ten thousand, long after he has
died. Rodriguez said that if museums are still around in a thousand
years, they will hold different artifacts. "Maybe the remains and
collections of you and me," he said. "By then, the collections you
and I are now looking at will have gone home."

We came to
a cabinet door, and Rodriguez lifted a key from his overburdened
chain. He unlocked the door and opened it, revealing a wall of
polished wooden drawers.

"Chaco," he said, like a
magician throwing back a curtain.

He pulled open one of
the drawers and I nearly fell into it, leaning over a glut of
turquoise jewelry and intricate animal effigies carved from smooth
black stone, all dating back a thousand years. The artifacts were
all from Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico. They came from
turn-of-the-century excavations, most from the late 1800s, when
archaeology was less a science than a free-for-all. Archaeologists
were filling boxcars bound to the East Coast, feathering the nests
of private collectors and prominent museums. They are not on public
display because no museum can possibly show all of its holdings. It
would be a garish nightmare of antiquities.

In this
storage room everything was neatly contained and controlled. We
went drawer to drawer; wooden banners with colorful displays, then
a collection of painted flutes. There were huge bowls dizzy with
geometric designs, bold black paint on shimmering white clay. I was
filled with a sense of time in a way I had never been before.
History had been brought to a fine point here, centuries leading to
this moment.

I asked Rodriguez if he had any sense of how
Native Americans feel about these vaults of their artifacts. He
told me that a Pueblo elder had to come to see the collection.
Rodriguez showed him through drawers and shelves, explaining how he
had counted all the beads and made foam beds for the more fragile
artifacts to rest within. The elder turned to Rodriguez and said,
simply, "They are pleased with your work."

"They?" I
asked. "Who are they?"

"They,"
Rodriguez said, as if I should have known. "The ancestors."

Native Americans, to whom these
artifacts arguably belong, had little control over their own
antiquities until 1976, when a road crew in Iowa unearthed 26
skeletons of Caucasians and one of an Indian woman. The Caucasian
remains were re-buried in a nearby cemetery while the Indian
remains were sent to the Office of the State Archaeologist for
further study. The message was clear: Whites are humans; Indians
are specimens. A Lakota-Bannock woman took the case to court and
eventually won the right for these remains to be returned to the
ground. Since then, repatriation trials have been commonplace.

The tide has begun to turn. Bones
and artifacts are going back to the ground. Looking for a Native
perspective on this, I spoke to Will Tsosie, a Navajo archaeologist
living in Shiprock, N.M. Tsosie told me that everything has a life,
whether grass, rock or handmade vessel. And everything that has a
life must also die. All that we have collected from the ground must
eventually go back to it, just as Anibal Rodriguez had said.

"My upbringing and my culture says we only let go once,
only put people away once, and hope no one will disturb them,"
Tsosie said. "We hope they will slowly return to the earth. The
objects we study are also in the process of returning."

As we talked about the strangeness of grave-digging, and how
curious it is we amass every antiquity we can find, Tsosie told me
a story.

"A long time ago, when I was young, I made a
journey to New York and went to the Museum of the American Indian,"
Tsosie said. "They had some masks from our Nightway ceremony that
were on display, and it was just like when my father was young,
when he was part of a relocation program to get jobs in cities. He
got shipped off to Chicago where he went to the Field Museum, and
there he saw the same thing. He spoke to the masks, asking them
why are you here, saying, you don't
belong here. I didn't know it then, about him speaking to
the masks, but I did the same thing. I said to the masks,
what are you doing here? You probably miss the voices, you
miss the songs, you miss the landscape. You should go
home. It made me very sad. People don't realize that certain things
have power. They have spirit. They need to go back."

I went back to the wilderness. I walked for 27
days across the sandstone origami of Utah. It took that long to
decipher routes in the cliffs and find places not yet pillaged.
There I found the depressions of graves that had not been dug.
Everything was still in place, corn cobs in caves, stone tools on
the ground.

I came to a crack in a cliff-base, took off
my hat, and stuck my head inside. Peering into the dimness, I saw a
shape through dangling black widow webs. I reached in and with the
tips of my fingers picked up a light woven object the size of a
small mixing bowl. I brought it to the light. It was a basket, a
1,500-year-old coil-weave style. I was astonished, mouth open,
almost laughing. Finally, here it was. Nobody had gotten to it.

The artifact was perfect, a tawny weave of dry yucca
fibers curated by the desert. People had put it here long ago,
knowing it would survive if it were kept out of light and wind.
They thought they would come back for it, or if not them, their
children or grandchildren. But something happened. The line of
memory was broken, and no one ever returned.

I stayed
with the basket for two days, drawing it, photographing it, living
with it. I turned it around and around like some small planet,
studying its fine and ancient coils. So much has been destroyed or
taken from the land that I was heartened to see something still in
its place.

Maybe this will be the last of the last. When
all the graves are dug and all the artifacts taken, this might be
the final piece of antiquity still in the earth. Upon finding such
a basket, some people would tell authorities who perhaps would send
a federal archaeologist or a ranger to retrieve it, "saving" the
artifact from inevitable destruction. Others might take it for
themselves. When I was done with it, I did the only thing I could.
I slid it back into its nest of spider webs and dust. I left the
basket to the future, letting the line of memory fade as I took my
hand off it and walked away, out of the wilderness.